Interviews

Dave Arneson Interview

GameSpy: Why fantasy, though? You had started out playing with real-world armies.

Arneson: Some other people in my group set up rules for modern games, or even back in the age of Napoleon. We would get in these arguments, though, about historical accuracy, the latest translation of the latest book, and what was "real." Going into a fantasy world was actually again kind of a copout from my point of view. I didn't want people always coming up with some new book saying we just had to use because it was right and the old one was wrong. This was a fantasy world, so who could come up with anything to prove that he was lying or that a monster wasn't accurately represented? [Laughs]. Now, of course, there's book on everything. It's trickier than it was in the beginning when there weren't as many (fantasy) books.

GameSpy: So basically at the time you could say, "Listen, white is whatever I say it is."

Arneson: Yeah. You know, nobody ever said, "Here's my translation of some such book," and said I was wrong. It was easier for me to referee.

GameSpy: So you started playing Chainmail using the fantasy rules. How did you have to change the rules around?

Arneson: We had to change it almost after the first weekend. Combat in Chainmail is simply rolling two six-sided dice, and you either defeated the monster and killed it or it killed you. It didn't take too long for players to get attached to their characters, and they wanted something detailed which Chainmail didn't have. The initial Chainmail rules was a matrix. That was okay for a few different kinds of units, but by the second weekend we already had 20 or 30 different monsters, and the matrix was starting to fill up the loft.

I adopted the rules I'd done earlier for a Civil War game called Ironclads that had hit points and armor class. It meant that players had a chance to live longer and do more. They didn't care that they had hit points to keep track of because they were just keeping track of little detailed records for their character and not trying to do it for an entire army. They didn't care if they could kill a monster in one blow, but they didn't want the monster to kill them in one blow.

GameSpy: How consistent was your fantasy world? Could you develop a whole history right at the beginning or did that come later?

Arneson: No, that came later. I needed the first couple games to work out the rules. I came up with the maps and the castle, and [then] I came up with the characters and monsters. I didn't worry about any kind of world. Frankly, I didn't think it was gonna add up to some sort of campaign that was gonna last 35 years.

I built it as I went along, and as the guys wanted to do more. That really was good because then I had to keep notes and organize them. I wanted to be consistent. I had learned that from role-playing the military games. You had to be consistent. So I started keeping notes in a little three-ring binder, and then there was a much bigger three-ring binder. [Laughs]

GameSpy: When you and Gary started working together to take all of the ideas you had come up with and put it into kind of a cohesive rules form, you certainly contributed the bulk of the nuts and bolts rules. How much of the contribution did you have to the fiction and the storyline, and some of the other areas that eventually became Dungeons and Dragons?

Arneson: Well, the initial D&D world was really just Gary's campaign, my campaign, and maybe a couple campaigns from people that were players in our group. There wasn't really any cohesive historical background and fiction for either Blackmoor or Greyhawk. Those details came later on.

Probably the first fantasy campaign that had a lot of historical and cultural detail was done by Professor M.A.R. Barker with his world of T¿kumel. He even had languages and cultures for his game far beyond anything that I or Bob or any of the guys that were involved in Blackmoor. T¿kumel finally got into print after D&D was published.